Mr Redmayne played the role of the professor in the 2014 biographical drama The Theory of Everything arrived at the University Church of St Mary the Great.
The church is very close to Gonville & Caius, the Cambridge College, Professor Hawking’s academic home for more than 52 years.
Five hundred invited friends, colleagues and family are expected to attend Saturday's private service, followed by a private reception at Trinity College.
Mr Redmayne will give a reading at Prof Hawking's funeral, with Ecclesiastes 3.1-11 as the chosen text.
This will be followed by a reading by the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees. Eulogies will be delivered by Robert Hawking, the professor’s eldest child, and Professor Fay Dowker, a former student of Prof Hawking.
Professor Dowker’s eulogy praised Mr Hawking’s accomplishments.
She said: “Stephen was my teacher, mentor and friend. I, like many who knew and loved him, had come to think of him as immortal and our sorrow is tinged with a feeling of disbelief that he is no longer here.
“But his influence and legacy will live forever. Robert, Lucy, Tim, members of the Hawking family, friends and carers of Stephen: it has been said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice’.
“Stephen, in his life, worked to make it so. We can also say, ‘The arc of the history of science is long but it bends towards unity’.
“Stephen’s place in that great history is eternal.”
The service will be officiated by the Reverend Dr Cally Hammond, Dean of Cambridge University's Gonville and Caius College, where Prof Hawking was a fellow for 52 years.
An arrangement of white lilies, to represent the universe, and another of white roses as the polar star will be placed on Prof Hawking's solid oak coffin.
These are from his three children Lucy, Robert and Tim who will follow the hearse to the church in cars.

The bell of Great St Mary will toll 76 times, once for each year of Prof Hawking's life, when Prof Hawking's coffin arrives
The flags of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, Trinity Hall, Cambridge and University College, Oxford are flying at half-mast in honour of Prof Hawking.
Mr Hawking died peacefully in his Cambridge home on March 14 this year.
The professor was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 22. He was given just a few years to live after this diagnosis, but lived with the condition for a further 54 years.
Mr Hawking’s ashes will later be interred on June 15 near the grave of Sir Isaac Newton at Westminster Abbey.